Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate.

CARTOON/COLUMN: The myopic selfishness of libertarians

Almost half a century ago, Bob Mays, the young pastor of a small church in north Seattle, envisioned a retirement complex where the elderly could find loving care, no matter how poor they might be, and a permanent home, even if their money ran out.

Mays shared his vision with his congregants at Olympic View Community Church. They enthusiastically embraced it. A number of them mortgaged their own homes to raise capital for the project. And, in 1972, Northaven, a non-profit retirement community, opened its doors.

Last week, my wife, Nole Ann, and I helped host a fundraising celebration for Northaven, and recalled Bob Mays’ selfless dream. Nole Ann talked about how her father joined with Mays to help build Northaven. At the time, it seemed clearly the right and Christian thing to do. My father-in-law could not have known that, after his death, Northaven would become a wonderful final home for his wife, my mother-in-law.

That’s how community works. People band together, sharing their time, labor and wealth, to do important things for their struggling and needy neighbors. They do it out of humanitarian impulse without expecting to be paid back. But, one way or another, they do benefit.

Few would argue that such humanitarianism is not a civic virtue. But when those humanitarian gestures come with the backing of government, virtue becomes villainy in the eyes of many of today’s neo-libertarians.

Communitarian and libertarian philosophies have both enhanced American life from our earliest days. Yes, individual freedom has been our constant guiding principle, but the way we have managed to sustain that liberty has always been by acting in community, sometimes with the force of government. From the Mayflower Compact to the Constitution to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we have made laws to give order to our freedom. And we have used government projects and programs — from the Erie Canal and the Homestead Act, to free public schools, Social Security and the GI Bill — to bring more and more individuals into the full scope of liberty, prosperity and legal protection.

Despite our illusions, none of us is entirely self-reliant. All of us are part of a community and benefit from that community, whether we are rich or poor. Try running a successful business if there is no government to enforce contracts, root out corruption, keep streets safe, build roads and bridges or educate and train workers. Try living a good life if streets are filled with destitute and lawless people or if air and water are polluted and food is unsafe. There are certain things individuals cannot do for themselves.

Everyone needs a community and all have responsibilities to that community. The poor have the responsibility to not break the law and to take every opportunity offered to improve their situation rather than live permanently on someone else’s generosity. The affluent have the responsibility to provide those opportunities – not just by building businesses that provide well-paying jobs, but also by sharing a portion of their wealth through taxation to pay for a social safety net; the schools and training programs, medical care, unemployment insurance and child nutrition programs that sustain those without resources and enable them to escape poverty and rise in our society so they and their children can help shoulder the load.

To some Americans, though, this communitarian sensibility is suspect, subversive and way too European. To resist it, they have banded together in a libertarian surge that has transformed US politics.

The hard truth about many of today’s anti-tax, anti-government libertarians is that their philosophy comes down to little more than myopic selfishness. They want smaller government, not because there is any real threat of tyranny, but so they can do whatever they wish with their property or business, regardless of the consequences to their neighbors or the shared environment. They vote to eliminate the taxes that support the social safety net, pulling information out of the Internet’s fount of fabricated “facts” to prove it’s all a scam to waste money on undeserving freeloaders.

I suppose that undeserving class of freeloaders would have to include the residents of Northaven. You see, Northaven could not be sustained without the support of Medicaid. I guess, in the libertarian view, those old folks who have spent lifetimes raising families and working at jobs that did not pay enough should be left to fend for themselves rather than have government lend them a hand with somebody else’s money.

I make a pretty good income and have no loopholes or tax shelters to exploit like the wealthy, so I pay more taxes than most people. I don’t love it, but I don’t resent it, either, because I agree with. Oliver Wendell Holmes who said, “Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.” The anti-tax zealots don’t seem especially concerned about civilization. Whether holed up with their assault rifles in a wilderness cabin, riding high in a private jet on their way to a Palm Springs golf course, or busy running another anti-tax ballot campaign, they feel scant obligation to their fellow citizens.

To them, liberty is the freedom to be left alone, to do whatever the hell they want with their property and to keep it all for themselves. That’s a cramped definition of liberty that assumes that anyone can escape what happens in the outside community. No one can. Ask any rich South American who has been forced to flee his country when the inequities in his homeland got so extreme that the social order was overthrown by revolution or an epidemic of crime.

One way or another, if the problems of a city, a state or a nation are neglected, those problems will spread and eventually end up on everyone’s doorstep. Forget empathy, generosity, humanitarianism or Christian charity. Be selfish, but still grasp this hard truth: Taxes are anarchy insurance, the fee we pay to guarantee we don’t lose it all.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate.